The Great Y.A. Debate of 2014

When the journalist Ruth Graham finished reading John Green’s tear-jerker of a best seller “The Fault in Our Stars,” her eyes were dry, and she wondered: “Does this make me heartless? Or does it make me a grown-up?”

Graham asked those questions in an essay on Slate earlier this month, in which she expounded on her “fuddy-duddy opinion” that “adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.” Given the boom in adult readership of young adult books, reaction online was swift and retributive. On Twitter, Hillary Kelly, an editor at The New Republic, wrote: “Read what makes you happy. Or unhappy. Or curious. Or uncomfortable. It’s your reading life.” Alyssa Rosenberg, a blogger at The Washington Post, tweeted: “For the love of all that is holy, NO YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE ASHAMED OF READING YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE.”

In an essay on Nerve, the author Kathleen Hale wrote a defense of her genre that took the form of an imagined meeting with Graham, written in a Y.A. style: “We laughed again, because what else could we do? The varsity team had been eaten by mermaids and werewolves, and everything was up to us.”

The pro-shame camp included The New York Times’s movie critic A. O. Scott, who told Graham via Twitter that her argument “needed to be said,” and later wrote, “The problem is really the cultural devaluation of maturity.”

In The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri suggested that the debate could be resolved by enterprising bookstores: “Why pit one against the other? Put ‘Romeo and Juliet’ back in Y.A. where it belongs. Sell ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ as a companion set.”

Quotable

“Many people didn’t recognize me, and when I did tell them during a normal conversation in the car that I was a film director, they just looked at me like I was so deluded as a homeless person that believed he was a cult film director.” — John Waters, discussing his new hitchhiking memoir on NPR

Self-Published in the Spotlight

The Guardian has teamed up with the publisher Legend Times to brave the rapids of self-publishing and single out one book each month for special recognition. The first winner is “Dinosaurs and Prime Numbers,” a novel by Tom Moran.

The Guardian then turned around and reviewed it like any other work of fiction. The assessment by Alison Flood makes it sound like a Douglas Adams-like affair, including a cow that exists outside of time and space. “The humor can become exhausting,” Flood wrote. But for those who imagine the very worst about self-publishing, fear not: “Spelling, grammar, the rest of it, are all spot on.”